On a dark night in Paris in November 1407, Louis I, Duke of Orléans – the younger brother of King Charles VI of France – was dining with his sister-in-law, Queen Isabella, when he received an urgent summons from the king. Orléans and his attendants left the queen’s residence at Hôtel Barbette bound for the king’s quarters at Hôtel Saint-Pol.
They had only ridden one block on their mules when a band of armed assailants rushed from the shadows of a cross-street. Overpowering Louis’ attendants, they pulled the duke to the ground, striking him with an axe and beating him repeatedly with clubs. Satisfied that he was dead, they then set fire to a corner house, in which they had resided for a week pretending to be university students.
The summons had been a ruse. The perpetrators of the crime were agents of Louis’ cousin, the rapacious John ‘The Fearless’, Duke of Burgundy. Having achieved their deadly aim, they mounted their horses, and fled the city.
Civil war in France
A fierce rivalry had developed over the course of the previous three years between Louis and John over who should rule as regent of France on behalf of the mentally infirm Charles VI. Charles suffered from bouts of schizophrenia, and so it had been decided that either a regent or council needed to rule for him.
The ambitious Orléans, who had grudgingly shared power with the king’s two influential royal uncles – John ‘The Magnificent’, Duke of Berry, and Philip ‘The Bold’, Duke of Burgundy – found himself in increasing conflict with the shrewd and uncompromising John the Fearless, who succeeded his wise father Philip in 1404.
John decided in September 1407 to murder his cousin after Louis refused to reinstate Burgundian members of the royal council that he had removed earlier that year. The murder touched off a civil war in France between the Burgundians and the followers of Louis, first known as Orleanists and later as Armagnacs or Dauphinists. The faction took its name from Bernard VII, Count of Armagnac and Constable of France, who became the most powerful figure in the French royal government after the Orleanists seized control of Paris from the Burgundians in 1413.
The civil war would last nearly three decades to 1435, and would test the ability of the two French factions to resist the English in the final, ‘Lancastrian’ phase of the Hundred Years War – the long-running series of conflicts between the kingdoms of England and France, which had begun in 1337. In England, Henry IV (John of Gaunt’s son) had become, in 1399, the first king from the House of Lancaster, a branch of the royal House of Plantagenet. He and his ministers had refrained initially from interfering directly in France’s civil war. Their position changed, however, in 1411, when Henry IV sent Thomas Fitzalan, the Earl of Arundel, with a small English army to assist the Burgundians against the Armagnacs.
After John of Burgundy’s forces drove the Armagnacs away from Paris, it was the turn of the latter to appeal to Henry IV for assistance against the Burgundians. Having obtained promises of sweeping territorial concessions from the Armagnacs, Henry IV dispatched his second son, Thomas of Lancaster, the Duke of Clarence, to assist them in resisting a Burgundian offensive on Armagnac lands in central France.
Landing in Normandy, Clarence arrived with 4,000 troops, as had been promised in September 1412, only to find that the Armagnacs had signed a truce with the Burgundians. At that point, he raided briefly in the Loire Valley and extracted financial recompense from the Armagnac nobles, before marching south to Bordeaux (which had been English since the accession of Henry II, husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine, in 1154). From there, Clarence returned to England, though it is likely that he believed he had been deprived of an opportunity for glory in battle.
Henry V’s quest for glory
Following his father’s death in March 1413, the king’s eldest son, the Prince of Wales, took the throne as Henry V. He prepared immediately to resume full-scale war against France in order to press the Plantagenet claim to the French throne, asserted by his great-grandfather Edward III at the start of the Hundred Years War. Henry demanded not only that the Armagnacs cede Aquitaine and Normandy to him, but also that Charles VI give him the hand of his youngest daughter, Catherine of Valois, in marriage. He landed at Chef-de-Caux, at the mouth of the Seine, with 10,000 troops on 13 August 1415.
Although Clarence participated in the brief siege of the port of Harfleur that followed the landing, he contracted a debilitating illness that forced him to return to England before the Battle of Agincourt (see MHM 61) – the landmark victory on 25 October, at which the English longbow proved decisive in overcoming a numerically superior French force. The second son of Henry IV therefore missed the chance to bask in the glow of this morale-boosting success, leaving him keenly desiring an opportunity to prove himself in a pitched battle with the French.
Having returned to England in triumph, Henry V renewed the war with France in 1417, and over the course of a two-year campaign conquered the Duchy of Normandy. The Burgundians drove the Armagnacs from Paris in May 1418, forcing the dauphin Charles – Charles VI’s teenage heir – to relocate his court to Bourges in the Loire Valley. Henry officially took control of Paris from the allied Burgundians on 1 September 1419. Nine days later, the dauphin’s agents assassinated John of Burgundy at Montereau, 50 miles south of Paris. He was succeeded by his son, Philip III of Burgundy (also known as Philip ‘The Good’).
Through the Treaty of Troyes, signed the following year with Queen Isabella and Philip of Burgundy acting as agents for the deranged Charles VI, Henry married Catherine of Valois and received the right to become the heir to the French throne on Charles VI’s death. But this bid to unite the crowns of England and France, of course, set aside the right of succession of the dauphin – Charles’ own son – and so the war continued.
The Scottish connection
With the Burgundians in possession of Paris and the English controlling Normandy, Dauphin Charles, who was hard-pressed for troops, appealed for reinforcements to Scotland – which had been a dependable ally of the French kings as a result of the Auld Alliance of 1295. The Scottish regent, Robert Stewart, the ruthless Duke of Albany, subsequently agreed to send substantial forces to assist the dauphin.
An army of 6,000 Scottish soldiers arrived at La Rochelle, on France’s Atlantic coast, in October 1419. Robert Stewart’s son John, the Earl of Buchan, and Archibald Douglas, the Earl of Wigton, commanded the force, two-thirds of which was made up of much-needed archers to offset England’s deadly longbowmen.
The initial strategy for deploying the Scottish troops, whose primary base was south-west of Paris in the province of Touraine, was to distribute them to defend Dauphinist strongholds in Anjou, Maine, Tours, and the Île-de-France. However, the Scots did not fare well in their first major open-field clash against the English, on 3 March 1420. In that encounter, Thomas Montagu, Earl of Salisbury, routed a Franco-Scottish force attempting to relieve the besieged Scottish garrison at Fresnay, 17 miles north of Le Mans.
That defeat, as well as other setbacks in 1420, compelled the dauphin to reassess the way in which he used his precious Scottish troops. At a meeting in January 1421 of his great council at Selles-sur-Cher, on a tributary of the Loire, Dauphin Charles and his advisers resolved not to break up the Scottish army and distribute its troops in small groups; instead, they decided to keep the Scottish army intact and seek an opportunity for a decisive battle on favourable terms against the English. The dauphin believed that this new approach would enable Buchan and Wigton to bring to bear their full complement of Scottish archers in a decisive open-field battle against the English.
Clarence invades Anjou
Having conquered Normandy and secured Paris, Henry departed with Catherine for England in January 1421 to garner support for a continuation of the war, as well as to recruit more troops. While Henry was absent, Clarence served as the king’s lieutenant in Normandy. The duke, who was 33 years old at the time, viewed his older brother’s brief return to England as the perfect opportunity to garner lasting fame by conquering some French territory on his own.
Dauphinist forces had regularly been raiding Lower Normandy from their bases on the Loire, and Clarence resolved to launch a bold counter-strike into Anjou, on the lower Loire, where he hoped to capture the provincial capital of Angers by a coup de main. He assembled 4,000 troops at Bernay, west of Paris, and set off in mid-March on the 140-mile march south-west to Angers.
Clarence’s army included an impressive group of nobles and senior knights, including John Holland, Earl of Huntingdon; Lord John Roos, Captain of Mantes and Château Gaillard; Lord Walter Fitzwalter; Sir John Grey; and Gilbert V de Umfraville. Also participating in the raid were Clarence’s stepson John Beaufort, Earl of Somerset, and Beaufort’s younger brother Edmund. The English found river crossings undefended as they marched south-west, passing through the commune of Baugé, 25 miles from Angers, on their way.
The English arrived at Angers on Friday, 21 March 1421. Unfortunately for Clarence’s men, the French garrison had closed the gates before they could get a foothold inside the city. Deciding that its high walls and circular towers would make it too hard to capture by storm, Clarence withdrew his army 15 miles east to the village of Beaufort-en-Vallée, where it encamped.
Little did he know, Clarence was about to stir up the proverbial hornets’ nest. Having learned of the English raid, Buchan had assembled 5,000 troops at Tours, and now marched into Anjou in a bid to engage the English before they could withdraw north. Marshal Gilbert de Lafayette reinforced Buchan with 1,000 French troops.
Buchan originally intended to move into a blocking position north of Angers, along the nearby River Loir, one of the region’s many direct and indirect tributaries of the Loire. But when he learned that Clarence was in fact at Beaufort-en-Vallée, a few miles further south, the Scottish earl took up a position at Le Vieil Baugé, a hamlet situated on a low ridge on the right bank of the River Couasnon, eight miles north-east of the English camp.
‘Let’s go get them!’
On the afternoon of 22 March – Easter Saturday – nearly all of the English archers and some of the men-at-arms were out foraging. One group of English foragers captured four Scottish foot soldiers. Clarence, who was eating his supper at the time, stopped to interrogate the prisoners. On learning that the French camp was nearby, he decided to launch an immediate attack, without waiting for the remaining foragers to return.
Although he had probably learned that the captured troops belonged to a sizable enemy force, he was confident of the prowess of English arms, and believed he could easily smash the enemy. ‘Let’s go get them!’, he is supposed to have said, rising without finishing his meal. ‘They are ours!’
By attacking at once, Clarence would be going into battle without his deadly archers. English longbowmen had played a principal role in defeating the French at nearly every major battle of the Hundred Years War. Clarence was taking a huge risk by attempting to defeat the enemy without them. One of his main concerns was that the Franco-Scottish force might retreat to the safety of Tours, 40 or so miles east, thereby depriving him of an opportunity to achieve glory by defeating them in battle. He could not have been more wrong.
Clarence issued orders for all of the men-at-arms in camp to mount up as quickly as possible for a rapid march to Le Vieil Baugé. Huntingdon and Umfraville implored the duke not to attack that day. They cited the lateness of the hour, the need for more thorough reconnaissance, and the absence of archers. Unwilling to fight on Easter Sunday, Clarence was also unwilling to wait until Monday, which would give the enemy two days to improve their defensive position.
Clarence advanced against the enemy with just 1,000 mounted men-at-arms. Accompanying him were Huntingdon, Umfraville, Fitzwalter, Roos, Grey, and the Beaufort brothers. Before departing, Clarence instructed Salisbury to remain behind, to gather the 500 remaining men-at-arms when they returned to camp, and to bring them to Le Vieil Baugé as quickly as possible. Although Clarence had a small group of mounted archers with him in his personal bodyguard, they would not be nearly enough to counter the superiority of Buchan’s force with the bow.
Skirmish on the bridge
As Clarence rode north, Lafayette was returning with several of his men from a reconnaissance of La Lande-Chasles, about six miles south-east of Le Vieil Baugé on the left bank of the Couasnon. Buchan had sent him there to scout the ground because the earl believed it offered a better position for a battle.
Spotting the English banners through the trees as he neared Clarence’s fast-approaching column, the French commander and his entourage spurred their horses and thundered across the narrow stone bridge over the Couasnon just ahead of the English. As he reached the right bank of the Couasnon, Lafayette spread the alarm that the English were attacking in force.
Buchan had assigned 30 archers under Robert Stewart of Ralston to guard the bridge, half a mile north of Le Vieil Baugé. They grabbed their bows and sprang into action. A group of 100 archers under Hugh Kennedy, who were camped nearby, quickly reinforced them. As the armoured English horsemen approached the eastern entrance to the bridge, lethal volleys of arrows greeted them.
Although the Couasnon was more like a stream than a river, the thick marshes that lined its banks would make it difficult for heavily armoured men and their horses to ford the river quickly. Nevertheless, Clarence and his lieutenants believed that was the best way to clear away the archers. A large body of English men-at-arms dismounted, therefore, to lead their horses through the river upstream of the bridge. Once on the opposite side, the English men-at-arms assailed the left flank of the Scottish archers, forcing the Scotsmen to fall back in disorder towards the village.
With both ends of the bridge in English hands, Clarence’s armoured horsemen poured over it. ‘With the greatest difficulty and furious fighting… the duke and his men gained a passage across the bridge on foot and sought the open country near [Le Vieil Baugé],’ reports the 15th-century chronicle known as the Scotichronicon.
With nightfall fast approaching, Clarence did not wait for Salisbury to arrive with the rest of the mounted troops before continuing south to engage the enemy’s main force. He pressed on with those who had kept pace with him, for some had become too exhausted as a result of the skirmish at the bridge to participate in the final advance to battle.
Disaster at Le Vieil Baugé
The English reached the Scottish main force at 6pm. The Franco-Scottish host numbered 6,000, but Buchan only needed half that number to defeat the English on the day. The sparse accounts from the period do not describe how Buchan deployed his forces, nor how he positioned his archers. Although Buchan would not have been able to crowd all his troops into the narrow front atop the ridge at Le Vieil Baugé, he would still have substantially outnumbered Clarence’s men-at-arms. A conservative estimate is that he had enough troops in action to outnumber the English by three to one. Neither commander had time to arrange his forces effectively. Moreover, reinforcements arrived on both sides of the field throughout the brief but bloody encounter.
For his part, Clarence had allowed his quest for personal glory to blind him to all of the practical matters that a competent commander should weigh before launching an attack. He proceeded with his assault even though it ought to have been clear to him that the enemy not only had numerical superiority, but also occupied a relatively strong defensive position.
By the time the main battle began, Clarence had lost all hope of surprising the enemy. Accounts of the battle lack detail and contradict each other. One version has the two sides charging each other, and then dismounting to continue fighting hand to hand. A more likely description of the fighting records that the English dismounted and advanced uphill against the Scots. Either way, the English would have encountered a withering barrage of Scottish arrows. Heavily outnumbered, and without archers of their own to guard their flanks, they stood little chance of success.
In his expensive armour, and with a jewel-adorned gold coronet atop his bascinet, Clarence was easy for the Scottish troops to spot. The two sides collided with the sharp clang of hundreds of edged weapons. Scottish men-at-arms fought their way to Clarence and his bodyguards, who were clustered around the duke’s banner. Clarence was among the first casualties of the battle. It is unknown exactly who felled him nor by what manner he died. Roos supposedly perished trying to save Clarence. Umfraville and Grey also lost their lives in the desperate attack. The Scots took Huntingdon and the two Beaufort brothers captive for ransom. English heralds reported 1,054 casualties, and almost as many were captured or missing. By contrast, Franco-Scottish casualties were light.
‘All will be yours’
Following Clarence’s death, command of the English army devolved to Salisbury. He retreated north on Easter Sunday, pursued by the Franco-Scottish army. The latter had abandoned the field of battle early that morning, which allowed a group of English troops who had not yet joined the retreating column to recover Clarence’s body.
Salisbury led his troops on trails through woods to conceal them as much as possible from the prying eyes of enemy scouts. The English slipped across the Loir and then across the River Huisne at Pontlieu, two miles south of Le Mans. The Franco-Scottish force marching north crossed upstream of the English, and failed to make contact with them.
Writing to Charles, Buchan and Wigton urged the dauphin to make the most of their victory over the English by reinforcing them with French troops for an invasion of Lower Normandy. ‘With God’s help, all will be yours,’ they said.
The victory that Buchan and Wigton had obtained over Clarence erased any doubts that the dauphin and his senior commanders had in regards to the effectiveness of Scottish forces. The battle also provided proof of the ongoing power of the Auld Alliance in combating England’s expansionist ambitions – further strengthening a bond of friendship that exists to this day. It even prompted the Pope, Martin V, to reflect that ‘Verily, the Scots are well known as an antidote to the English’.
With their morale suitably boosted, the Dauphinists took from the English a good number of fortified towns and châteaux on the frontier of Lower Normandy in the months that followed. However, the failure of the Scots to prevent the escape of the remnant of the English army would have serious repercussions. On his return to France that summer, Henry V reversed the Dauphinist gains.
The Scottish forces would soon meet with a defeat as ignominious as that which Clarence had suffered. That defeat – at the Battle of Verneuil on 17 August 1424 – came not at the hands of Henry V, who died a premature death in 1422, but those of his younger brother John, Duke of Bedford, the third son of Henry IV. At Verneuil – often described as a ‘second Agincourt’ – the once-triumphant Franco-Scottish army was itself mauled: Buchan died in the battle, having shed his blood, like Clarence, on foreign soil.
For the two primary adversaries, of course, the end of the Hundred Years War was still almost three decades away – after the appearance of Joan of Arc at the Siege of Orléans (1428-1429) began once again to turn the tide in favour of France, reducing the need for Scottish involvement, and leading eventually to a final, decisive victory over the English at the Battle of Castillon on 17 July 1453. •
Further information
Desmond Seward, The Hundred Years War: The English in France 1337-1453 (Penguin, 1999).
Jonathan Sumption, The Hundred Years War IV: Cursed Kings (Faber & Faber, 2015).
John A Wagner, Encyclopedia of the Hundred Years War (Greenwood Press, 2006).
